Funded - Thank you! Also: Progress Update + Photography.

My apologies for being so late in updating here. We funded on Saturday! Thank you!

Feels a little weird this time around. For Beyond Flour, we didn't really start work on the book until it successfully funded - which it did, early on in the campaign.

This time, we started SERIOUS work on the book long before it funded. So, rather than "Yay, it funded! Let's get started", this is more of a ... "Yay, it funded ... here's what we've been up to since the last update" kind of thing! :)

With our hop harvest probably only a month away, I've been busily developing recipes so we can take advantage of fresh hops /leaves / bines while we have them. I've actually fallen back into a bad habit I have when it comes to writing cookbooks, but I'm correcting that today.

You see, I'll develop a recipe that make perfect sense to me, but is really just a list of ingredients and VERY shorthand notes. I put that into a notepad file for that recipe, and save it to a folder, then move on to the next. Eventually, I'll have an entire book's worth of recipes... and have to go through ALL of them to actually write the recipes. When it's done like this; it's a really boring, arduous task. Days and days of just writing directions. Then, even more time writing the introduction to each - which can be challenging, months after developing the recipe.

This time, I swore I'd write out the entire recipe AND intro as I developed each. That when time came to assemble the book, there'd be no more loooooong days of "But I don't wanna!".

Well, I have about 8-10 recipes done up as scrawl now. Boo. I was doing so good there for a while! I'll be working on that today and tomorrow, and will hopefully be caught up by then!

I'd made a similar commitment to the photography. For each dish developed, we have a photo shoot, sometimes getting dozens of photos of an item. Each dish has its own folder, and I go through to find 2 perfect photos - one upright, one horizontal. Only one photo makes it to the book, but both are needed in case of formatting issues, and to have on hand for potential promotional uses. One newspaper article may want horizontal, the next may require vertical orientation.

Once I've selected the photos, I transfer the files - in both JPG (so I can see them on my computer) and CR2 (the raw files to be edited) to a "to edit" file for my husband.

Much like writing recipes, as an individual thing, it's not too bad... right now, I have 12 folders to go through. Whoops!

As an idea of what that selection process goes like, here are a few photos from one set. These are completely unedited shots, so no worries - they'll be prettier in the book:

So very similar - sometimes it's only a very slight change of angle that makes the difference between getting cut, and getting used.

Now, imagine going through 2 dozen images that are all about that level of variety... and then doing it again for several other folders of images. Mind numbing... but so worth it, in the end!

This actually means very little to you guys, btw - whether doing the recipes and photos as we produce them, or in a batch at the end... it'll be on deadline. This doesn't set me back at all, just figured it could be an interesting peek behind the scenes at how it actually comes together.

I'll just be less surly to be around at the end if I don't have a week or two worth of recipe writing to do :)

As of right now, we have 20+ recipes developed and photographed. A big chunk of the book done, but still a long way to go!

Thank you again for your support! Hope I'm not boring you with photography details and such - I never have any idea what people want to hear about!

Do you guys have any questions about the process? Thoughts on what kind of updates you'd like?

Comments

Superbacker

I'm interested in whatever you want to share, because I enjoy hearing about the process of how things are made. What do your quick notes look like? How do you harvest your hops? How have the experiments been going? How do you choose ingredients/recipes, and does the type of hop have anything to do with your choices?